Inside U.S. Trade features an interview with HHS Assistant Secretary for Global Affairs Nils Daulaire, who discusses how “the department is playing a larger role than ever before in the development of U.S. trade policy, including on sensitive issues in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations like a draft proposal for…

World Health Day, observed annually on April 7, is held to mark the founding of the WHO in 1948 “and is seen as an opportunity by the organization to draw worldwide attention to a subject of major importance to global health each year,” GlobalPost reports (4/3). Noting the theme this…

Science Translational Medicine on Wednesday published a commentary “authored by Harold Varmus, Nobel prize-winning director of the National Cancer Institute in the U.S., and by Harpal Kumar, CEO of Cancer Research U.K., on behalf of leading [cancer research] institutions from Australia to Argentina and Taiwan to Turkey,” in which they describe a…

In a post in the BMJ Group Blogs, Katy Cooper, senior project manager at C3 Collaborating for Health, describes “what is happening around the global framework on non-communicable diseases, and how NCDs link into discussions on the successors to the Millennium Development Goals (due to expire in 2015) and the proposed…

“The time has come for the ‘[non-communicable disease (NCD)] agenda’ to be integrated with the broader ‘sustainability agenda,’ and this was the focus of a joint meeting this week between the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the Lancet,” Richard Smith, director of the United Health Group’s chronic…

Writing in the PLoS blog “Translational Global Health,” Greg Paton, a public health consultant, discusses the history of and current discussions taking place surrounding global targets for non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Noting the goals include reducing the consumption of salt and trans-fats and increasing access to exercise and healthy food, among others, he…

“Multinational food, drink and alcohol companies are using strategies similar to those employed by the tobacco industry to undermine public health policies, health experts said on Tuesday,” Reuters reports. In a study published in the Lancet, “[t]he researchers said that through the aggressive marketing of ultra-processed food and drink, multinational companies were now major…

Inter Press Service reports on “a conference organized by the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (IFPMA) on World Cancer Day [February 4] in Geneva,” during which experts warned about the growing burden of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) — “cancer, heart disease, diabetes and chronic respiratory diseases, among others” — especially…

“For the poor, cancer remains a silent killer. Breaking this silence could save hundreds of thousands and likely even millions of lives each year — most of them in developing, low- and middle-income countries (LMICs),” Felicia Knaul, secretariat co-director of the Global Task Force on Expanded Access to Cancer Care…

The GAVI Alliance “is to help protect more than 180,000 girls in eight countries across Africa and Asia from cervical cancer by funding immunization projects with vaccines from Merck and GlaxoSmithKline,” Reuters reports in an article examining the group’s efforts to vaccinate young women with Merck’s Gardasil and GSK’s Cervarix, “the world’s…